America Rising (39 page)

From that brief self-conscious two-step I could tell they were more than bodyguard and client, something I filed away in my mental folder for future reference. We shook hands and he sniffed the air appreciatively; the beer and fried oysters on my breath must have given me away.

“I’m sorry, John,” I said. “I just went to get something to eat. I wasn’t expecting you for another half hour.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “Next time try Mahoney’s. Best po’ boys in town.”

“Maybe I’ll treat.”

He looked at me like he might have found a kindred spirit.

“Maybe I’ll accept.”

The black woman cleared her throat and shot a glance at the hotel elevators.

“But first we need to take care of business.”

We trooped up to my room. John and I sat around a small work table. His “friend” peered out the window, scanned the buildings and street, pulled the curtains shut, then sat facing the door. He watched her with obvious affection and shrugged. “Precautions,” he said.

I set my miniature voice recorder on the table between us but before I could click it on his hand closed over my wrist.

“A couple ground rules,” he said. “One, no mention of my friend here, either direct or oblique. I have my reasons, and they’re good ones. Two, ask anything you like, but I won’t promise I’ll answer. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

It wasn’t the worst interview I’d ever done, and it certainly wasn’t the best. John Doe wasn’t kidding about not being willing to answer all of my questions. I kept circling back to them, one by one, like a vulture over carrion, but he pushed me away with a shake of his head and his trademark bemused smile.

I did find out a few things, though. That as an infant a few days old he was found abandoned in the bathroom of a hospital emergency room just outside San Francisco. That he was given the last name of his first set of foster parents but always answered to John Doe. That he was a wild teenager but settled down, that the foster parents he finally stuck with had long since passed but left him with a financial stipend that let him go on the road in search of people in need. That his self-imposed “mission” had taken him to more than a dozen cities in a half-dozen states for the past twelve of his thirty-seven years.

I found out he really didn’t remember much about the incident at Audubon Park that rocketed him into the national consciousness. He said he felt like he was in a trance, watching someone else, and I believed him. I found out about his flight to Memphis, that there were two attempts on his life there, a third at his house in the Lower Nine, but he wouldn’t offer details or speculate as to who or why.

I found out that he despised politics and politicians but loved blues and jazz, B.B. King and John Coltrane. That he loved to read and hoped to write a novel one day. That he had a weakness for fast women and slow-cooked barbecue, for cold beer and single-malt scotch, that he’d indulged those weaknesses to excess on more than one occasion.

I found out that he’d worked a compendium of blue-collar jobs, that he was a skilled cook, mason, carpenter, plumber and truck driver. That he believed in non-violence but would kill to defend himself and others, that underneath his aw-shucks smile and easygoing manner was pure case-hardened steel.

I found out that his political philosophy, if you could call it that, could be stated simply: We
all
matter. That he was stunned it was perceived as some dangerously radical notion, that he was even more stunned by his celebrity and enormous national following and missed his privacy with a painful intensity.

And I found out one more thing: that I liked him immensely, that he might just be the man who could make hope and change more than just glib campaign slogans, who possessed both the naïveté and ruthlessness to take on power and defeat it. I thought that he liked me too, even though his “friend” sat impassive through our entire conversation, emanating silent disapproval.

As they were leaving, John stopped in the doorway and said, “If you’re going to be in town and don’t mind staying up late, there’s a place I’d like you to see.” The black woman’s stoic expression cracked and she grabbed his arm as if to drag him away but he gave a tiny shake of his head and whispered, “It’s okay, Sheila. I trust him.” To me he said, “Meet me at SayNo’s office at midnight. And don’t forget about Mahoney’s.”

I didn’t forget about Mahoney’s, the nouveau po’ boy shop on Magazine Street. I had their grilled shrimp, fried green tomato and remoulade po’ boy and it was one of the best things I had ever put in my mouth. I went back to the Quarter, bounced around for a few hours, then caught a cab downtown and met John Doe on the sidewalk in front of SayNo’s office.

“Isn’t Sheila coming with us?” I asked, just to let him know I’d been paying attention.

He smiled and said, “You caught me. She’s not coming with us. But she will be around.”

He left me to ponder that one as we cabbed over to Rampart Street. “This is the best jazz club in town,” he said. “One hundred percent New Orleans. It used to be Donna’s but the new owners didn’t change a thing but the name. I hope you don’t mind dives.”

After just a few hours on Bourbon Street I was ready for anyplace that didn’t include strip clubs, open-air bars and drunken frat boys guzzling their way to an early-morning puke fest. The club was everything John Doe said. A total dive, packed with locals, and a band made up of any musicians who felt like sitting in and playing their hearts out until the sun came up.

We sat at a table in front of the tiny stage and between sets I took the opportunity to get us another round of beers and probe a little further.

“What made you change your mind about the interview?” I prodded, sliding a chilled bottle across the table and taking a swig of my own.

“Are we off the record here?” John Doe asked back.

“John, as far as I’m concerned we’re off the goddam planet.”

“The last time they came after me,” he said simply. “Day before yesterday. At my house.”

I’d rumors of an early morning firefight in the Lower Nine. “The gang battle. Or so they say.”

“Did they say gangbangers with military-issue equipment rappelled from a helicopter at three-thirty in the morning?”

I wasn’t surprised. “Ah, no. So who were they?”

“I’m not sure. But Sheila has these. . . ‘friends.’ They’re a team, really. They found me in Memphis, saved me. Said both attempts were by someone named Leland Elliott. He supposedly works, or worked, for Frank—”

I couldn’t keep the shock off my face.

He looked at me attentively. “Are you okay, Josh?”

I was still processing it all.

“I know Leland Elliott,” I said finally. “He’s from Miami; I wrote an exposé of him. Before you left for Memphis he sent a couple thugs to my house to find out my sources for the story.” I held up my bandaged finger. “They tried to chop it off.”

The shock was John Doe’s now.

“Jesus Christ! What happened?”

“They broke in while I was sleeping. Held me down, sliced off my pinkie. After that, I don’t know. I saw a red light, heard a voice, just for an instant. Then I woke up in the hospital. When I went back home it was like nothing had ever happened.”

He was silent for a moment, then let out a long, low whistle.

“Holy shit.”

I didn’t want to talk about that. I didn’t want to talk about me.

“You said Sheila had ‘friends,’ a team. Who are they?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, they found me, I didn’t find them. They know what they’re doing, though. Ex-military, CIA, private, I couldn’t tell you. But they are professionals. And there are a lot of them, at least two teams just on me.”

Something in my head clicked. I had to know more.

“Why, John? Why them? Why you?”

“They said I was important, that some people thought I was dangerous.”

“Are you?”

He gave a self-deprecating snort.

“Important? Maybe to the few people I’ve managed to help. But dangerous? Maybe so. But it’s hard for me to imagine.”

“Maybe you should. Listen, this team of yours, can you tell me anything about them? Names, ages. Height, weight, accent. Identifying marks. Anything?”

“Not much. You’ve already met Sheila.” He gave me a stern look, anticipating the question he knew I wanted to ask. “And, yes, we are. When I’m with them they don’t use names, just the team—Blue or Red. And a number—One through Four. Four I think is the computer guy. Hispanic, mid-thirties. Longish hair, very little accent. Three definitely seems ex-military. White. Big and beefy, shaven head and face. He’s a shooter. One is obviously the leader. He’s older, in his forties. Short hair, close beard. Not big but he just looks powerful. Moves like an athlete. They all look up to him. They don’t say much, though. Not to each other, not to me. They’re just. . .”

He was still talking but I wasn’t listening. Suddenly I
knew.
Absolutely knew. Now everything made sense. Dozens of threads now pulled together in an intricately woven tapestry as plain as words on a page. John Doe must have noticed my far-off expression because once again he looked at me strangely but by then the band had launched into a ferocious take on Charlie Parker’s “Ornithology” and we let the music carry us away.

It was closing in on four in the morning when the band finally played itself out. We decided to walk back to my hotel and call a cab for John from there. At that hour New Orleans is a combination of magic and the gutter, the honeyed scent of night-blooming jasmine mingling with the stench of rotting garbage, the frantic thrum of the French Quarter reduced to an eerie calm broken only by the occasional racing cab and the weary exclamations of spent, straggling partiers.

I debated whether to tell John about my revelation, how much to tell him, whether spilling my guts would help or hurt. But in the end I realized that he deserved to know, that he’d earned that right a hundred times over with his selflessness and courage. I stopped under a lamppost a couple of blocks from the hotel and said, “There’s something I have to tell you, John.”

And I did.

I told him of my conversation with Chloe Enders, of Joe Josephson’s kidnapping and the business card that read only “FEAR,” of the repeated attacks on the representatives of money and power by a group that could seemingly neither be identified nor apprehended. I told him my belief that a war was being waged deep beneath the surface, a war for the very soul of the country, that these unknown warriors and Sheila’s “friends”—his guardian angels—were one and the same. There was only one thing I didn’t tell him; I really don’t know why.

When I was done I could see the burden of my words settle on him.

“I always wondered why they chose me,” he said. I could see something approaching panic shining in his eyes. “But I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t want it. I can’t do it.” He was almost pleading. “I don’t want to be a symbol. I don’t want to be a leader. I don’t want the position. I don’t want the power.
I am not that person!”

At that moment, standing under the wan glow of the streetlight, the sweet-sour essence of the city filling my nostrils, I felt terribly, terribly sorry for him, yet at the same time strangely buoyant, even hopeful.

“Actually, John,” I said, “I think you are.”

T
he first phone call earned a curt, “Yeah, right,” and a sharp bang! of the receiver being slammed down.

The second call, less than a minute later, got a moment’s edgy silence, a mortified, “Oh, my God!”, then a round of groveling apologies and a frantic search for John Doe, who was dragged out of the bathroom, fly still unzipped, thrown into a chair and handed the still-warm receiver.

“It’s the president!” hissed the young woman who took the calls, her face the color of a very ripe tomato.

John Doe stared at her as if she’d suddenly sprouted wings and a tail.

“It’s the president!” she hissed again, a little louder. When he kept staring she said, louder still, “Of the country! You know, the United States of America.”

“The White House,” someone else added helpfully.

“Holy shit!” John Doe held the receiver to his face.

“What was that, Mr. Doe?” Nancy Elias asked.

“Uh. . . oh. . . ah. . . Nothing, Madam President. I mean, Good morning. I mean, How are you? To what do I owe the pleasure of your call?”

“The pleasure is all mine, Mr. Doe.”

Instantly John Doe’s bullshit detector revved into overdrive, ready to translate her words into English.

“I have a proposition for you.”

Get ready to be screwed.

“First, however, I understand that you have been the victim of certain. . . incidents of a violent nature. I want you to know that no member of this administration or in any position of authority had anything to do with them.”

You can’t prove a thing.